NOTES AND THOUGHTS WHILE ON PLANE FROM SPRINGFIELD TO DENVER EN ROUTE TO BALANTA HOMELAND IN GUINEA BISSAU
Preface to Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral
“The right of peoples to self - determination - a pillar of international law that formed the political and juridical basis of the decolonization process for which people fought - has been emptied of its substance by the promotion and implementation of an unjust and illegal economic order that has involved privatization and the commodification of almost all aspects of life, as well as the militarization of international relations. . . . Independence remained unachieved, and instead of working towards emancipation of peoples, they have resulted in recolonization in novel forms, under which peoples are subjected to a globalized neocolonial order based on the domination of plutocracies over exploited and despised populations. . . .”
I. Introduction
“The first steps in liquidating a people,’ wrote Milan Kundera, ‘is to erase its memory...the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. . . .
Cabral once wrote, ‘We consider that when imperialism arrived in Guinea it made us leave history - our history.... The moment imperialism arrived and colonialism arrived, it made us leave our history and enter another history.’ . . .
Like many others, Cabral realized that revolutionary movements need to win over sections of the petit bourgeoisie - the so-called ‘middle class’ - whose skills and knowledge could serve the movement so long as they were able to commit class suicide. Torn between fighting freedom from colonial oppression through association with forces of liberation and the attraction of the privilege, wealth, accumulation, and self-aggrandizement offered in the wake of independence, this historically vacillating class has always been notoriously unreliable. . . .
II. No Easy Victories
Liberation, Cabral argues, does not only mean recovering history but also making one’s own history. . . . He believed in Fanon’s Marxian notion that people change as they make history, and in that basis considered that ‘class suicide’ of the petit bourgeoisie was possible. . . .”
When my great, great, great, great, great grandfather arrived in America, he too was removed from history, his B’rassa history, and entered into the history of America. He was made to forget his name. To this day we still don’t remember his name, but we refer to him by the name they gave him, “George”, named after the great slave-holder and factious disturber of the peace, the British cop-killer George Washington. “George” and almost all the other enslaved in America were forced to forget their names, their language, their histories. The memories were erased. The people liquidated. Almost.
Genetic testing and genealogy research empowered the descendants of those who were taken from their homes in Africa and enslaved in the west to remember and reclaim their histories. I have reclaimed mine. Memory struggles against forgetting and is winning.
Three volumes of Balanta B’Urassa later, and I remember now how my ancestors unflinchingly refused to be dominated by hierarchies and foreign powers who demanded that they pay taxes to “authorities” they did not authorize... And so this has changed me, too. Because the moment one internalizes the meaning of self-determination, and commits to it, one changes. One behaves differently. One becomes the authority concerning what is best for oneself. And, under a system of injustice, under a system of American white supremacy, running off the plantation is a crime. Seeking freedom is a crime. Keeping the fruits of one’s labor and refusing to pay taxes is a crime. No one has the right to appropriate the fruit of my labor. No government to whom I did not choose to become its citizen can force me to give it what is mine.
So Cabral is correct, it DOES change one. You create your own history. You refuse to give your resources to a foreign, colonial, oppressive government to feed its new forms of an illegal economic order. One realizes there is little difference in working for the slave master and giving him 100% of the fruit of one’s labour versus working for the illegal economic order and giving the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) 33% of the fruits of your labor. So when one determines for oneself that that 33% is better invested in one’s own initiatives, now one becomes defiant, an outlaw, subject to an imposed jurisdiction claiming authority derived from conquest and “might makes right” and the oppressor’s version of history. . . .
And whether you are just an individual Person or an entire people struggling for liberation, for freedom, there necessarily comes a moment when opposing wills must confront each other. And if both sides are equally committed, someone must die. . . . And this is what Cabral understood and this is why my Balanta people fought an armed struggle against their oppressors.
You have to go beyond committing class suicide. You have to be willing to actually commit suicide, because this is almost the inevitable terms of resisting oppression and defending one’s freedom from within America. Their overwhelming might makes this the forgone conclusion. If you are afraid to die, you will stop resisting in the face of overwhelming force and you will sacrifice your freedom to live.
You can’t be afraid to die and at the same time be free.
Yet, the shining ray of Cabral and the people of Guinea Bissau showed that it is possible to defeat an overwhelming military force. . .
But what if the conditions of struggle prevent any hope of a unified force for armed liberation? Then you, as an individual, are in an intolerable position. . . .
NOTES AND THOUGHTS ON PLANE TO LONDON EN ROUTE TO BALANTA HOMELAND IN GUINEA BISSAU
Amilcar Cabral and the Transformation of the African American Left in the United States by Bill Fletcher Jr.
“Cabral suggested that class suicide was not a specific or one-time act; it was actually a process and practice. One does not eliminate all vestiges of one’s class aspirations by engaging in armed struggle for freedom or, for that matter, taking this or that job or turning down specific opportunities (that might be made available as a result of one’s class background). Rather, class suicide must be linked to building a movement for social transformation in which the oppressed are the direct instruments of their own liberation. . . .
A third contribution focused on Cabral’s notion of national liberation struggle being a process of a people ‘returning to history.’ This was invaluable insight in that it suggested that colonialism had taken the oppressed outside of what would have been their normal path of development and deformed their evolution. National liberation, then, was not only a matter of freeing a people from external domination and national oppression, but was an emancipatory process at a more fundamental level. It was about colonized people regaining their humanity and self-determination that went far beyond a national flag and borders to chart their own trajectory.
Returning to history was not only valuable for traditionally colonized people but equally for considering the question of African Americans under the boot of white supremacist national oppression. African Americans, whose ancestors were largely ripped out of history and implanted in the United States as slaves, were central as a workforce in the development of North American capitalism. They have been treated as a people without a history. As a result, the struggle for African American liberation becomes not only a struggle for rights, but a struggle to rediscover our own history and place on this planet, including our relationship to and with the rest of the African world.
Cabral’s ‘returning to history’ transcends a cultural nationalist obsession with a mythological past or an academic understanding of history. It links history to the future to the need of a people to recreate itself in a contemporary context. To put it differently, understanding history is insufficient in the absence of a popular revolutionary project.
Central to Cabral’s thinking and practice was the reaffirmation of the dignity and humanity of those who have been subject to colonialism and National oppression. He reminded the Left that history preceded the class struggle and would continue well after the end of antagonistic classes.”
Of course I’m scared. I’m alone. Going to a place I call home, to a people I claim as mine, from whom I’ve descended, from where and from whom I have been separated for 250 years.... If colonialism has taken the oppressed outside what would have been the normal path of development and deformed their evolution, what had 250 years of slavery, Jim Crowism, and forced assimilation done to me? Did I really want to know? I have been to Africa many times and to many places - Ethiopia, Ghana, Togo, Benin, South Africa, Egypt. But this time I was returning to the actual place of my great great great great great grandfather, home of my actual ancestors. These were my people. This was different.
Balanta are my heroes, mythical and actual. Warriors who have resisted those who tried to enslave them. But my great great great great great grandfather was captured and he was enslaved. His son was born into slavery. For six generations we have not known freedom.
The brutal torture ended perhaps with my great great great grandfather, born into slavery in 1819 but emancipated in the 1850’s. But the damage was done. We have not known living under our own power. We have been subjects to white supremacists and their ever refining system of white supremacy.
They put their language in me. They put their miseducation in me. They made me into something they designed to fit within their world - an economic input into their sick system. An unnatural man with an unhealthy mind in an unhealthy body living in an unhealthy society in the unhealthy world they created.
But there is something they couldn’t take away. Something I can only call “spirit”. This thing that won’t allow me just go with their rules and their system.
Why? Why can’t I go along with being black in America? Just follow their rules, work, pay my taxes, try to provide a comfortable life for my family?
Why do I feel robbed and cheated? Why do I feel like I can’t pay income taxes to the IRS - I cant give them their tribute and be happy and live with dignity?
I’m scared. I no longer have any income. I have no job. The IRS says I owe them $136,000, money which I don’t have and even if I did, I couldn’t give it to them and respect myself. I would feel compromised, broken, surrendered. I can’t do that.
So what will happen if I refuse to pay? Will they try to take the only property I have - the car I bought for my wife? My books, a tv and a computer? If I were to find a job, would they garnish my wages? How could I not feel like a slave if I worked everyday yet the IRS took My money before I even receive it?
How will my wife feel if, because of my tax situation, she cannot bring her daughter to live with her in the United States? What hope will she have of a happy life with me and her daughter? She would be forced to choose....
Or we could go live in China, but then I would have to leave my sons behind. How could I be happy, exiled from my sons?
I could return to my people in Guinea Bissau but that is not the life my wife signed up for and most likely I would lose her and be exiled from my boys, their mother refusing me to take them with.
And if I stay in the United States and my refusal to accept the economically imposed slavery? Would it not eventually end in either submitting or escalating into an armed conflict in which I am certain to die, labeled as a troubled, mentally unstable black extremist?
Even if I were to get a lucrative opportunity, like another six figure book deal, or enough to settle with the IRS, what would it do to my spirit, to my dignity? Could I still call myself Balanta, “those who resist” if I stop resisting the IRS?
Yet in my mind, in my soul, I find myself coming to terms with the inevitable. I must die sometime. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. I am going to die eventually. That being the case, I can die resisting, exercising self determination, or I can die a slave, submitting to theft by economic, judicial, and police coercion. This, I suspect, is a choice all men must make, except those to whom submitting to the system grants privileges and wealth gained through unjust enrichment.
So my spirit, my soul is conflicted as I get closer and closer to Balantaland. Will the ancestors accept their long lost child? For I am like a child, I am my great great great great great grandfather who was taken as a child. I am he returning, a Balanta child in a man’s form striving for true manhood - something that cannot be achieved in America under the system of white supremacy.